In archaic and classical Greece, the art of divination, the art that deals with everything « that is, that will be and that was »,i was considered knowledge par excellence. In Plutarch’s On the E of Delphi,ii Ammonios says that this knowledge belongs to the domain of the gods, and particularly to Apollo, the master of Delphi, the God called ‘philosophos’. The sun, reputed to see and know everything and illuminate whoever it wished, was merely his symbol, and Apollo, son of Zeus, was really the mantic God in essence. However, at Delphi, another son of Zeus, Dionysus, was also involved in the art of mantics, competing with Apollo in this field.iii Dionysus, ever-changing, multi-faceted and ecstatic, was the opposite and complementary type of Apollo, who was the image of the One, equal to himself, serene and immobile.
In Homeric Greece, an augur like Calchas tried to hear divine messages by distinguishing and interpreting signs and clues in the flight of birds or the entrails of sacrificial animals. He sought to discover and interpret what the Gods were willing to reveal about their plans and intentions. But, at Delphi, the divinatory art of Dionysus and Apollo was of a very different nature. It was no longer a question of looking for signs, but of listening to the very words of the God. Superhuman powers, divine or demonic, could reveal the future in the words of the Greek language, in cadenced hexameters. These powers could also act without intermediaries in the souls of certain men with special dispositions, enabling them to articulate the divine will in their own language. These individuals, chosen to be the spokespersons of the Gods, could be diviners, sibyls, the « inspired » (entheoi), but also heroes, illustrious figures, poets, philosophers, kings and military leaders. All these inspired people shared one physiological characteristic, the presence in their organs of a mixture of black bile, melancholikè krasisiv .
In Timaeus, Plato distinguished in the body a « kind of soul » which is « like a wild beast » and which must be « kept tied to its trough » in « the intermediate space between the diaphragm and the border of the navel »v. This « wild » soul, placed as far as possible from the rational, intelligent soul, the one that deliberates and judges free from passions, is covered by the liver. The ‘children of God’, entrusted by God ‘the Father’‘viwith thetask of begetting living mortals,vii had also installed the ‘organ of divination’ in the liver, as a form of compensation for the weakness of human reason. « A sufficient proof that it is indeed to the infirmity of human reason that God has given the gift of divination: no man in his right mind can achieve inspired and truthful divination, but the activity of his judgement must be impeded by sleep or illness, or diverted by some kind of enthusiasm. On the contrary, it is up to the man of sound mind, after recalling them, to gather together in his mind the words uttered in the dream or in the waking hours by the divinatory power that fills with enthusiasm, as well as the visions that it has caused to be seen; to discuss them all by reasoning in order to bring out what they may mean and for whom, in the future, the past or the present, bad or good. As for the person who is in the state of ‘trance’ and who still remains there, it is not his role to judge what has appeared to him or been spoken by him (…). It is for this reason, moreover, that the class of prophets, who are the superior judges of inspired oracles, has been instituted by custom; these people are themselves sometimes called diviners; but this is to completely ignore the fact that, of enigmatic words and visions, they are only interpreters, and in no way diviners, and that ‘prophets of divinatory revelations’ is what would best suit their name. »viii
Human reason may be « infirm », but it is nonetheless capable of receiving divine revelation. Soothsayers, oracles, prophets or visionaries are all in the same boat: they must submit to the divine will, which may give them the grace of a revelation, or deny it to them.
Plutarch refers to the fundamental distinction Homer makes between soothsayers, augurs, priests and other aruspices on the one hand, and on the other, the chosen few who are allowed to speak directly with the gods. « Homer seems to me to have been aware of the difference between men in this respect. Among the soothsayers, he calls some augurs, others priests or aruspices; there are others who, according to him, receive knowledge of the future from the gods themselves. It is in this sense that he says:
« The soothsayer Helenus, inspired by the gods,
Had their wishes before his eyes.
Then Helenus said: ‘Their voice was heard by me’. »
Kings and army generals pass on their orders to strangers by signals of fire, by heralds or by the sound of trumpets; but they communicate them themselves to their friends and to those who have their confidence. In the same way, the divinity himself speaks to only a small number of men, and even then only very rarely; for all the others, he makes his wishes known to them by signs that have given rise to the art of divination. There are very few men whom the gods honour with such a favour, whom they make perfectly happy and truly divine. Souls freed from the bonds of the body and the desires of generation become genies charged, according to Hesiod, with watching over mankind ».ix
How did the divinity reveal itself? There is a detailed description of how Socrates received the revelation. According to Plutarch, Socrates’ demon was not a ‘vision’, but the sensation of a voice, or the understanding of some words that struck him in an extraordinary way; as in sleep, one does not hear a distinct voice, but only believes one hears words that strike only the inner senses. These kinds of perceptions form dreams, because of the tranquillity and calm that sleep gives the body. But during the day, it is very difficult to keep the soul attentive to divine warnings. The tumult of the passions that agitate us, the multiplied needs that we experience, render us deaf or inattentive to the advice that the gods give us. But Socrates, whose soul was pure and free from passions and had little to do with the body except for indispensable needs, easily grasped their signs. They were probably produced, not by a voice or a sound, but by the word of his genius, which, without producing any external sound, struck the intelligent part of his soul by the very thing it was making known to him.x So there was no need for images or voices. It was thought alone that received knowledge directly from God, and fed it into Socrates’ consciousness and will.xi
The encounter between God and the man chosen for revelation takes the form of an immaterial colloquy between divine intelligence and human understanding. Divine thoughts illuminate the human soul, without the need for voice or words. God’s spirit reaches the human spirit as light reflects on an object, and his thoughts shine in the souls of those who catch a glimpse of that light.xii Revelation passes from soul to soul, from spirit to spirit, and in this case, from God to Socrates: it came from within the very heart of Socrates’ consciousness.
iiiMacrobius, Sat. 1, 18, quoted by Ileana Chirassi Colombo, in Le Dionysos oraculaire, Kernos, 4 (1991), p. 205-217.
ivRobert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Oxford, 1621 (Original title: The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up)
xi« But the divine understanding directs a well-born soul, reaching it by thought alone, without needing an external voice to strike it. The soul yields to this impression, whether God restrains or excites its will; and far from feeling constrained by the resistance of the passions, it shows itself supple and manageable, like a rein in the hands of a squire. » Plutarch. « On the Demon of Socrates », Moral Works. Translation from the Greek by Ricard. Tome III , Paris, 1844, p.105
xii« This movement by which the soul becomes tense, animated, and, through the impulse of desires, draws the body towards the objects that have struck the intelligence, is not difficult to understand: the thought conceived by the understanding makes it act easily, without needing an external sound to strike it. In the same way it is easy, it seems to me, for a superior and divine intelligence to direct our understanding, and to strike it with an external voice, in the same way that one mind can reach another, in much the same way as light is reflected on objects. We communicate our thoughts to each other by means of speech, as if groping in the dark. But the thoughts of demons, which are naturally luminous, shine on the souls of those who are capable of perceiving their light, without the use of sound or words ». Ibid, p.106
Consciousness, obviously, is capable of grasping abstract, immaterial ideas – for example, the principle of non-contradiction or the concept of universal attraction. Can we deduce from this that consciousness is itself immaterial in nature? Materialists deny it. Consciousness is not immaterial, they say; it is only ever the material emanation of the material substance of material bodies. But then, how can we explain the fact that purely ‘material’ entities are capable of conceiving pure abstractions that are essentially unconnected with the material world? How could a consciousness that is only ‘material’ link up and interact adequately with all the beings of unknown essences that make up the world, with the various natures that surround or subsume it? What could be the stuff of the links between a ‘material’ consciousness with beings a priori totally unrelated to its own ‘matter’? In particular, how can a ‘material’ consciousness, confined in a ‘material’ body, interact effectively with other consciousnesses, themselves confined in other bodies? How can we imagine that a consciousness could link up (materially) with other beings existing in act, or in potential, throughout the world, and that it could penetrate (materially) their essence?
All these difficult questions were dealt with by Kant in his lively little work, Dreams of a Man Who Sees Spiritsi. But Kant does not adopt a materialist point of view. Quite the contrary. In this book, he asserts that consciousness (which he calls the ‘soul’) is immaterial, just as what he calls the ‘intelligible world’ (mundus intelligibilis, the world of ideas and thoughts), – immaterial. This ‘intelligible world’ is the proper ‘place’ of the thinking self, because the latter can go there at will, detaching itself from the material, sensible world. Kant also asserts that human consciousness, although immaterial, can be linked to a body, the body of the self, from which it receives material impressions and sensations from the organs of which it is composed. Consciousness therefore participates in two worlds, the material and sensible world and the immaterial and intelligible world, – the world of the visible and that of the invisible.
The representation that consciousness has of itself as being a ‘spirit’ (Geist), when it considers itself in its relations with other consciousnesses, is quite different from the representation it has when it sees itself as being attached to a body. In both cases, it is undoubtedly the same subject who belongs at the same time to the sensible world and to the intelligible world; but it is not the same person, because the representations of the sensible world have nothing in common with the representations of the intelligible world, says Kant. What I think of myself as a living, feeling, carnal being is not on the same level, and has nothing to do with my representation as (pure) consciousness.
Conversely, the representations that I may hold of the intelligible world, however clear and intuitive they may be, are not sufficient to give me a representation of my consciousness as a human being. The representation of oneself as (pure) consciousness can be acquired to a certain extent by reasoning or induction, but it is not naturally an intuitive notion, and it is not obtained through experience.ii
Consciousness does indeed belong to a single subject, who participates in both the « sensible world » and the « intelligible world », but consciousness is also twofold. It is not « the same person » when it represents itself as « pure consciousness » and when it represents itself as « attached to a (human) body ». The fact that it is not « the same » in these two cases implies an inherent, profound duality – consciousness is a dual being. Here, for the first time, Kant explicitly introduces the expression « duality of the person » (or « duality of the soul in relation to the body »iii). This duality can be inferred from the following observation. Some philosophers believe they can refer to the state of deep sleep when they want to prove the reality of ‘obscure representations’. We can only observe that they are no longer clearly present in us when we wake up, but not that they were really ‘dark’ when we were asleep.
For example, we might well think that they were actually clearer and more extensive than the clearest representations we have in the waking state. This is indeed what we might expect of consciousness when it is perfectly at rest, and separated from the external senses, Kant concludes.
Hannah Arendt found this particular idea ‘bizarre’iv, without further explaining or justifying her trenchant judgment. Perhaps it seems indeed ‘bizarre’ to assert that consciousness thinks more clearly and more extensively in deep sleep, and that it is then more ‘active’ than in the waking state? Or does it seem ‘bizarre’ to present consciousness not as ‘one’ but as ‘two’, this duality implying a contradiction with the unified idea that consciousness might a priori have of its own nature? Consciousness feels the intrinsic unity it possesses as a ‘subject’, and it also feels, as a ‘person’, endowed with a double perspective, one sensible and the other intelligible. It may therefore seem ‘strange’ that the soul should think of itself as both one and two, – ‘one’ (as subject) and ‘two’ (as person).
This intrinsic duality creates a distance between consciousness and itself, an inner gap within itself. It reflects a gap between the ‘waking’ state (where the feeling of duality is revealed) and the ‘deep sleep’ state, where the feeling of duality evaporates, revealing the true nature of consciousness.v
To ward off this ‘oddity’, Hannah Arendt proposed an explanation, or rather a paraphrase of Kant’s note: « Kant compares the state of the thinking self to a deep sleep in which the senses are at complete rest. It seems to him that, during sleep, the ideas ‘may have been clearer and more extensive than the clearer ideas of the waking state’, precisely because ‘the sensation of man’s body was not included in it’. And when we wake up, none of these ideas remain ».vi What seems ‘bizarre’ to Hannah Arendt, we then understand, is that after consciousness has been exposed to ‘clear and extensive’ ideas, none of this remains when it wakes up. Awakening erases all traces of the activity of consciousness (or of the ‘soul’) in the deep sleep of the body. Even if there is nothing left, there is at least the memory of an immaterial activity, which, unlike activities in the material world, does not encounter any resistance or inertia. There also remains the obscure memory of what was then clear and intense… There remains the (confused) memory of having experienced a feeling of total freedom of thought, freed from all contingencies. All these memories cannot be forgotten, even if the ideas conceived at the time seem to escape us. It is possible to conjecture that the accumulation of these kinds of memories, these kinds of experiences, will end up reinforcing the idea of the existence of a consciousness that is independent (of the body). By extension, and by analogy, these memories and experiences of deep sleep constitute in themselves an experience of ‘spirituality’, and reinforce the idea of a spirit world, an ‘intelligible’ world, separate from the material world. The consciousness (or spirit) that becomes aware of its power to think ‘clearly’ (during the body’s deep sleep) also begins to think of itself as being able to distance itself from the world around it, and from the matter that constitutes it. But its power to think ‘clearly’ does not allow it to leave this world, nor to transcend it (since waking up always happens – and with it forgetting the ‘clear’ thoughts of deep sleep).
What does this sense of distance from the world bring to consciousness?
Consciousness can see that reality is woven from appearances (and illusions). In spite of the very profusion of these appearances (and illusions), reality paradoxically remains stable, it continues unceasingly, it lasts in any case long enough for us to be led to recognise it not as a total illusion, but as an object, and even the object par excellence, offered to our gaze as conscious subjects.
If we do not feel able to consider reality as an object, we may at least be inclined to consider it as a state, durable, imposing its obviousness, unlike the other world, the ‘intelligible world’, whose very existence is always shrouded in doubt, of improbability (since his kingdom can only be reached in the abyss of deep sleep).
As subjects, we demand real objects in front of us, not chimeras or conjectures – hence the insignificant advantage given to the sensible world. Phenomenology teaches that the existence of a subject necessarily implies that of an object. The object is what embodies the subject’s intention, will and consciousness. The two are linked. The object (of intention) nourishes consciousness, more than consciousness can nourish itself – the object ultimately constitutes the very subjectivity of the subject, presenting itself to her attention, and even instituting itself as her conscious intention. Without consciousness, there can be neither project nor object. Without an object, there can be no consciousness. Every subject (every consciousness) carries intentions that are fixed on objects; in the same way, the objects (or ‘phenomena’) that appear in the world reveal the existence of subjects endowed with intentionalities, through and for whom the objects take on meaning.
This has a profound and unexpected consequence.
We are subjects, and we ‘appear’, from the very beginning of our lives, in a world of phenomena. Some of these phenomena also happen to be subjects. We then gradually learn to distinguish between phenomena that are merely phenomena (requiring subjects in order to appear), and phenomena that eventually reveal themselves to us as being not just phenomena, of which we would be the spectators, but as other subjects, and even subjects who are intrinsically ‘other‘, subjects whose consciousness can be conjectured as radically ‘other‘. The reality of the world of phenomena is thus linked to the subjectivity of multiple subjects, and innumerable forms of consciousness, which are both phenomena and subjects. The world represents a ‘total phenomenon’, whose very existence requires at least one Subject, or Consciousness, that is not merely a ‘phenomenon’.
In other words, if a thought experiment were to presuppose the absence of any consciousness, the non-existence of any subject, in the original states of the world, would we necessarily have to conclude that the ‘phenomenal’ world did not exist in this time of ‘genesis’? Undoubtedly. The ‘phenomenal’ world would not then exist, insofar as phenomenon, since no subject, no consciousness, would be able to observe it.
But another conjecture is still possible. Perhaps, in this time of ‘genesis’, there are subjects (or consciousnesses) that are part of another world, a non-‘phenomenal’ world, a ‘noumenal’ world, the ‘intelligible world’ evoked by Kant?
Since there can be no doubt that the world and reality began to exist long before any human subject appeared, we must conclude that other kinds of consciousness, other kinds of ‘subjects’ already existed then, for whom the world in the state of phenomenon, total and inchoate, constituted an ‘object’ and embodied an ‘intention’. In this case, the world has always been an object of subjectivity, of ‘intentionality’, of ‘desire’, right from its genesis.
It remains to try and imagine for which subjects, for which consciousnesses, the emerging world could then reveal itself as an object and as a phenomenon. We can hypothesise that this primal subjectivity, endowed with an ‘intentionality’, a ‘desire’, pre-existed the appearance of the world of phenomena, in the form of an original power to will, to desire, and to think. Man retains a ‘mysterious’ trace of this ancient, primal power, insofar as he is ‘thought made flesh’. « For the philosopher, speaking from the experience of the thinking self, man is, quite naturally, not only the Word, but Thought made Flesh; the always mysterious incarnation, never fully elucidated, of the ability to think ».vii Why is this incarnation ‘mysterious’? Because no one knows where thinking consciousness comes from, and even fewer can guess at the multiplicity of forms it has taken in the universe since the beginning, and may yet take in the future.
Since our only guide in this search is consciousness itself, we must return to it again and again. Every consciousness is unique because it recreates (in its own way) the conditions of the spirit’s original freedom. This freedom was not only that of the first man, but also of all that preceded him, of all that was before him and without him – of all that was non-human.
All consciousness is singular, and the solitary thinker recreates in his own way the absolute solitude of the first Man, the first Thinker. « While a man lets himself go and simply thinks, about anything for that matter, he lives totally in the singular, that is to say in complete solitude, as if the Earth were populated by one Man and not by men ».viii
Who was the first man, the first thinker to be « alone »? The one the Bible calls Adam? The one the Veda calls Puruṣa? Or some primal, original Spirit, creating in the thinker the living object of his living thought, and thereby creating the conditions for the engendering of a living multitude of other ideas (and other minds)?
We owe it to Parmenides and Plato, thinkers of the first depths, to have celebrated a few primordial spirits, among the most ancient of whom the world has preserved a memory. They admiringly quoted those sages who had lived long before them in ‘the life of intelligence and wisdom’, that life of Noûs and Sophia, which not all men know, but which all may wish to know. Intelligence and wisdom indeed « live », in the literal sense, for they live by the life of the Spirit. From the beginning, Socrates asserts, the Spirit, the Noûs, has been the « King of heaven and earth »: νοῦς ἐστι βασιλεὺς ἡμῖν οὐρανοῦ τε καὶ γῆς.ix
In this the Sirach agrees with Socrates, and goes back even further: « Wisdom was created before all things, and the light of understanding from eternity ».x
Paradoxically, this very ancient idea (that the Ancient Greeks and the Ancient Hebrews shared) now seems to have once again become one of those « secrets still buried in the dark depths of the earth ».xi
_____________________
iKant. Dreams of a Man who sees spirits, – explained by Dreams of Metaphysics (1766). Translated by J. Tissot. Ed. Ladrange, Paris, 1863
iiiIn a note appended to Dreams of a Man who sees Spirits, – explained by Dreams of Metaphysics.
ivH. Arendt. The Life of the Mind. Thought. The will. Translated by Lucienne Lotringer. PUF, 1981, p.68-69
vOne finds similar observations on the duality of the transient “ego” and the eternal “Self”, made by Indian thinkers and “rishis” such as Ramakrishna, Swami Vivekananda or Ramana Maharshi.
« The Absolute hovers eternally around us, but as Fichte put it so well, it is only there when we don’t have it, and as soon as we have it it disappears ».i
(F.W.J. Schelling)
« An immense river of oblivion drags us into a nameless abyss. O Abyss, you are the only God. The tears of all peoples are true tears; the dreams of all wise men contain a measure of truth. Everything here below is but a symbol and a dream. The gods pass away like men, and it would not be good if they were eternal. Faith should never be a chain. One is even with it when one has carefully rolled it up in the purple shroud where the dead gods sleep. »ii
(Ernest Renan)
The sum total of the mythologies invented by man can be compared to a sort of immense theatre, in which a multitude of cases of consciousness, divine or human, are presented in the face of their gaps, their rises, their falls or their metamorphoses. In their profuse richness and unexpected turns, mythologies bear witness to the ongoing evolution of consciousness, its attempts to represent what it cannot fully and clearly imagine. It doesn’t know what it’s looking for, but it knows it has to keep looking. Once it has started, all it wants to do is go further and further. For consciousness to continue to surpass itself, until it reaches what we might call a ‘completely different consciousness’, it must become aware of this desire, which is in its nature. It must understand what this desire to surpass implies, and what requires this demand for flight. He needs to penetrate the essence of surpassing himself.
Philosophy, both ancient and modern, generally assumes that human consciousness is the only valid, the only conceivable, the only reasonable, that it is the universal reference, and that there is no other. Under these conditions, it seems clear that philosophy is ill-equipped to understand what, in theory or in practice, could go entirely beyond it. It seems obvious that it cannot even imagine the putative nature of some radical overcoming that would transcend the present condition of consciousness, or rather that would go beyond the way in which it is usually conceived.
However, ‘philosophical’ reflection on the birth of ancient mythology, the contemplation of its history and the observation of its decadence can teach us a great deal about what other human consciousnesses were once capable of. By inference, it can point to other paths for the future of a philosophy of consciousness. For mythological discourse to exist, and then to be transmitted, from ancient times onwards, consciousness had to look back on itself, and thereby distance itself from the origins of beliefs and the nature of the aspirations or fears to which they responded. Today’s analysis of mythology allows us to consider not only the reason for the multiplicity of gods, or the thousands of names of the One Divinity, but the way in which they were invented, the motivations of their creators (the Poets or Prophets), and the orientation of their consciousness in their acts of mythological creation.
Hesiod and Homer recounted the genesis of the gods, their battles and their loves, but above all they helped to establish a critical, poetic, literary and even literal distance between their object and their subject.
Never losing sight of the ancient gods, remembered, feared or revered, the poets dared to create new gods; they conceptualised their new essence, highlighting it in contrast to that of the first gods. The creation of mythology by poets belongs to a ‘completely different consciousness’ from philosophy – not to deny it, but to accompany it. The sustained, free invention of a Heraclitus or a Plato went beyond poetry in a sense, but was not completely freed from it. Unlike philosophy, true creation, poetic creation, creates worlds that are truly alive. Through this truly living life, imagination liberates thought, frees it from all hindrance, gives it movement, leaves the field entirely open to invention, and breathes into the mind an essentially demiurgic impulse.
There are several levels or strata of consciousness that are active in a consciousness that creates and, in so doing, questions its nature, either striving to move forward or sinking into its night. When we speak of the Poet’s ‘other consciousness’, what exactly do we mean? Is it a subliminal consciousness, a latent preconsciousness, an underlying subconsciousness – all symptomatic forms of the unconscious’s own life? Is it an intuition of other states of consciousness, which might be defined as ‘non-human’, far removed from the usual condition of human consciousness? Or is it a supra-consciousness, a meta-noesis?
If we needed a classical term to fix ideas, we could call all ‘non-human’ states of consciousness ‘demonic’ (I mean the word ‘demonic’ in the sense of the ‘daimon’, the Demon or the ‘Genius’ of Socrates)iii .
Following in the footsteps of Hesiod and Homer, we could also describe these states as ‘divine’, giving this term the meaning of a projection of everything in the human being that tends towards the supra-human. Mythologies take it for granted that there are other types of consciousness than simply human. They also show that man is not in reality only what he appears to be. In theory at least, he could potentially be ‘something else’. The mythologies suggest that the (provisional) awareness that human consciousness attains of itself and of the world in general is still far from being aware of all the potential that it actually possesses. Human consciousness sets before it and develops the destiny of ‘divine’ entities that serve as models, or rather paradigms. The gods it imagines are avatars of consciousness itself, figures of its potential states. These imagined divine entities project consciousness into a world beyond its grasp, but of which it is, if not the very author (since it is the poet who creates it), at least the fervent spectator – or sometimes, which amounts to almost the same thing, the fierce critic. Mythology and its colourful fictions show the human conscience that it can be entirely other than what it is, that it can continue its journey indefinitely, and that, by mobilising its intelligence and its will, it will be able to go beyond all the places and all the heavens, which are within it in potential, but not yet in deed.
From the very beginning of the history of mythology, and throughout its development, consciousness has been the willing prey of the power that inhabits it in secret, a power that is blind and incomprehensible, but whose potentialities the myths gradually reveal to it.
Mythological awareness, that is to say, man’s awareness of the essence of the mythology he constructs for himself, his awareness of what it can teach him about the deepest nature of human consciousness, his awareness that it can give him a glimpse of the abyss of his origins and make him guess at some unimaginable peaks yet to be reached, is not, as far as the beginnings are concerned, very clear. It is, in fact, intrinsically obscure, even when illuminated by the violent, crude construction of poets like Hesiod or Homer, or under the veil of the thunderous flashes of inspired texts (like the Veda, Genesis or the Prophets).
Mythological consciousness will understand itself better at the end of the mythological era, when the gods appear more as literary or spiritual fictions than as flesh-and-blood realities. It will understand itself better when the blind power that has long inspired it in singular souls, diverse peoples and specific cultures is finally itself surpassed by the awareness of a new era, a new ‘genesis’, more philosophical and more critical than Genesis. When the inevitable death of the myths and the gods that have sustained them occurs, a powerful fire and breath will spring forth. This new fire, this fresh breath, will bring to light in the awareness of all that mythology concealed beneath its lukewarm ashes and the phoenixes that begged to be born.
So human consciousness is never merely in an ‘original’ state. Mythology shows that it never ceases to constitute its own future. The original essence of human consciousness is to appear to be master of itself, master of the self. It seems to possess itself, to reign undivided over the inner self. It reigns over itself. It is both this inner self (noted A) and the consciousness (noted B) that it has of this A. Consciousness is this B which has this A in itself, as a kind of matter of its own, open to all kinds of possibilities, and in particular to the possibilities of being-other, to the perspectives of not ‘being-only-A’, but ‘being-B-considering-A’, or even ‘being-B-considering-that-not-A’, or ‘being-anything-other-than-A-or-not-A’, and which we could call C, or X or Z.
It would be tempting to use the metaphor of gender here, to create an image. Consciousness B of the inner self A could be compared to the detached, controlled, controlling consciousness of the masculine being, whereas the consciousness of ‘being able to be-other’ (C, X or Z) could be compared to that intuition and that specifically feminine power of desiring, conceiving and really carrying within oneself a being-other, for a time, before giving it a life of its own. It is undoubtedly artificial to make a clear distinction between the masculine being of consciousness (consciousness B that says it is and sees itself as conscious of A) and the feminine consciousness of ‘being-other’ (the feminine possibility of conceiving and carrying within itself a being-other). The masculine and feminine are not only separable, they are also united in consciousness, which is fundamentally androgynous in nature, both animus and anima, to use Jung’s terms.iv
In all mythology, there are inflection points, key moments, caesuras, where meaning opens up and unfolds. For example, the sudden appearance of the character of Persephone forces Zeus himself to come out of his Olympus and forge a compromise between Demeter, the grieving mother, and the captor God, « the miserly Hades ».
From another point of view, not mythological but poetic, Persephone symbolises the light soul, seduced only by the scent of saffron, iris and narcissus, whose sweet perfume makes heaven, earth and sea smile.v … According to Simone Weil’s frankly metaphysical interpretation of the myth of Persephone, « beauty is the most frequent trap used by God to open the soul to the breath from above. » vi
But how can we explain the universal silence that responded to the cries of distress of the raped and kidnapped virgin? Could it be that there are some « falls » from which there is no coming back, for they are the kind that elevate and unite the soul to the « living God » himself, and bind it to him like a bride to her husband: « The fragrance of the narcissus made the whole sky above smile, and the whole earth, and all the swelling of the sea. No sooner had the poor girl stretched out her hand than she was trapped. She had fallen into the hands of the living God. When she came out, she had eaten the pomegranate seed that bound her forever. She was no longer a virgin. She was the bride of God »vii . For S. Weil, the subterranean world into which Persephone was dragged symbolises suffering, the pain of the soul, its atonement for an incomprehensible sin. The pomegranate seed is the seed of her renewed life and the promise of future metamorphoses, according to some invisible grace. For Schelling, on the other hand, Persephone represents the power of original consciousness. She is pure consciousness, virgin consciousness, but ravished, placed naked in the Divinity, hidden in a safe place. She is the consciousness on which God rests, the consciousness that founds him in the underworld of the Underworld. It embodies the subterranean interior, the innermost depths of divinity, its first hollow, its ancient crypt, above which cathedrals exult and harvests germinate.
It is consciousness sent to the world of the dead. There it withdraws, hides, merges and marries not the ‘living God’ invoked by Weil, but the God of the dead, the God of Hell, Hades, the taciturn brother of Zeus.
With the appearance of the pure virgin Persephone in the Underworld, the great story of mythology suddenly becomes aware of man’s still obscure impulses, his unfulfilled desires, his unacknowledged fears. The poet who sings of the love of the God of Death and the pure Persephone also realises that the mythology he invents can silence terrors and transport spirits. What dominated pre-mythological consciousness before him was the reign of the single, jealous, exclusive God – the God who, in order to remain unique, denied divinity to all the other gods. other « powers ». All these powers, including Wisdom or Intelligence, for example, or other Sefirot (to use a vocabulary that is more cabalistic than Hellenic), are not in themselves the true God, since only the one God is the true God. However, they are not ‘non-divine’ either, since they are admitted into His presence, and since they constitute avatars of that very Presence, the Shekhina, as the Jewish cabal alleges.
He is accompanied not only by his own Presence (Shekhina), as we have just said, but also by his Wisdom (Hokhmah) and his Spirit (Ruaḥ), according to Jewish Tradition, which, as we know, claims to be strictly monotheistic.
We could venture to assign a more abstract, more ‘structural’ role, signified by the conceptual triad of founding, separating and suturing, to the three divine powers just mentioned, which are apparently the most original, the most essential.viii
The Presence of the divine corresponds to its immanent power, its capacity for foundation, which, after Creation, is embodied in a primordial, original foundation – Matter.
Divine Wisdom, whose primary image is that of the Wind (or also the Breath), can be compared to a power of spiration, aspiration or inspiration, whose structural role is that of Separation, or Tearing (between the Divine and the non-Divine, or between Spirit and Matter, allowing in both cases the advent of the Other).
Finally, the divine Spirit represents the power of the Suture. The age of the Spirit, yet to come, could be conceptualised as that of the great cosmic Repair (Tikkun ‘olam).
These powers, and perhaps others, have undoubtedly inhabited human consciousness for thousands of years. They can be interpreted as avatars or representations of the one God.
What dominates in the consciousness of the One is very different from what dominated in the consciousness of the God Pan, which the Greeks conceived in their time. Pan is the God who excludes nothing, who encompasses everything, and who is All, who is also in essence the true πᾶν, of philosophical and cosmological essence. It could be argued that the consciousness of the one God is in fact conscious only of a partial πᾶν, a πᾶν of circumstances, a divine πᾶν, certainly, but an exclusive πᾶν, a non-inclusive πᾶν, a ‘whole’ that is far from containing within itself everything that is not divine, still less everything that is anti-divine. In the absolute exclusivity of the God of origins, there is not much room for an Other Being, who would have absolute freedom to be other, to live a truly other life, that is, one that would not be woven from the very substance of the origin.
The exclusive situation given to the one God could not last forever, at least if we consider the poles of the Cosmos and the Anthropos, and their proper roles. The God of origins cannot remain unique and alone in origin. Nor can he remain unique and alone in consciousness or in nature. He must abandon himself, and allow himself to be surpassed by the creation of the World that he himself initiated; he must also abandon himself by allowing the consciousnesses that emerge from it to be, whatever their forms.
The question is, what are we really saying when we say that God abandons himself and allows himself to be surpassed?
Before being effectively surpassed, the Almighty God must have allowed himself to be made surpassable by some power, hidden within himself, but only asking to be raised to consciousness. He must have had the power to surpass himself, before being brought into the presence of this surpassing.
What was this power to surpass hidden in God? To answer that question, we would have to invent a myth that could evoke what came before the myths. Here’s a suggestion: the life of mankind before myth, before history, before the Law, was undoubtedly fleeting, wandering, nomadic, ephemeral. Man was always running, from near to far, in search of the open sea, within the limits of the limitless. The absence of any place in his consciousness was his ‘place’. He inhabited this wandering. Nomadism was his sojourn. A stranger to himself, he had no idea where he had come from or where he was going. On the run, he was always a migrant on the earth, moving endlessly and without consciousness, like a shooting star that soon disappeared. When consciousness finally began to make its movement felt in Man, he conceived the existence of a possible relationship between the wandering of his race and the movement of his thought, between his wandering and the race of his consciousness. He saw a link between movement, transport, wandering, and crossing, overcoming, emancipation. In other words, he saw a resemblance between movement on the earth and the movement of the spirit in consciousness. This image never left him. The myths that his consciousness began to invent, for example, were based not on the near, but on the far, the intangible, the Sky. In the immense heavens, whether at night or during the day, movements seem to obey determined laws. For the conscience, agitated by constant mobility and anxiety at all times, the regular movement of the stars contrasted with the irregular wanderings of the planets and the random fall of meteors. For a long time, the conscience pondered this dual mode of movement, one in accordance with the rules, the other without them.
Mythology also appropriated this double movement. The orderly, regular movement of the stars and constellations in a fixed sky was the image of the One God. But the erratic movement of the planets and meteors also revealed another, hidden power of which the One God was seemingly unaware.
_______
iF.W.J. Schelling. Essays. Philosophy and Religion (1804). Translated by S. Jankélévitch, Aubier, 1946, p.180
iiE. Renan. « Prayer on the Acropolis ». Souvenirs of Childhood and Youth. Calmann-Lévy, 1883, p.72
iiiCf. Plutarch. « On the Demon of Socrates », Moral Works. Translation from the Greek by Ricard. Tome III , Paris, 1844, p.73
iv « Consciousness is a kind of androgynous nature, » says Schelling, who, more than a century before C.-G. Jung, prefigured the dual nature of consciousness as animus and anima. Cf. F.-W. Schelling. Philosophy of Mythology. Translated from the German by Alain Pernet. Ed. Jérôme Millon. Grenoble. 2018, Lesson IX, p.104.
« First I’ll sing of Demeter with her beautiful hair, venerable goddess, and of her light-footed daughter, once taken by Hades. Zeus, king of lightning, granted her this when, far from her mother with the golden sword, goddess of yellow harvests, playing with the maidens of the ocean, dressed in flowing tunics, she was looking for flowers in a soft meadow and picking the rose, the saffron, the sweet violets, the iris, the hyacinth and the narcissus. By the advice of Zeus, to seduce this lovable virgin, the earth, favourable to the avaricious Hades, gave birth to the narcissus, that charming plant admired equally by men and immortals: from its root rise a hundred flowers; the vast sky, the fertile earth and the waves of the sea smile at its sweet perfumes. The enchanted Goddess snatches this precious ornament from her two hands; immediately the earth opens up in the Nysian field, and the son of Cronos, King Hades, rides forth on his immortal horses. Despite her groans, the god seizes the young virgin and carries her away in a chariot glittering with gold. But she cried out loudly to her father, Zeus, the first and most powerful of the gods: no immortal, no man, none of her companions could hear her voice ».
viSimone Weil, Attente de Dieu, Fayard, 1977, p. 152-153.
viiSimone Weil, Attente de Dieu, Fayard, 1977, p. 152-153.
viiiThis triad is reminiscent of the Indo-European tripartite functions famously suggested by G. Dumézil, and can be found in the organisation of medieval society, which distinguished between oratores, bellatores and laboratores, those who prayed, those who fought and those who worked.
Pherecyde of Syros, the uncle and tutor of Pythagoras, active in the 6th century B.C., was the first to affirm that the souls of men are eternal, according to Ciceroi . However I presume that he must have been preceded by many shamans of ancient times, for whom eternity of souls was obvious, because they had personally experienced that human souls can travel between worlds, those of the living and those of the dead, under certain conditions.
Pherecyde wrote of a dead hero: « His soul was sometimes in Hades and sometimes in the places above the earth »ii . Did he have first-hand experience of these strange phenomena? Or was he just repeating stories he had heard from elsewhere ?
According to Suidas, Pherecyde had been influenced by the secret cults of Phoenicia. Many other Greeks, for their part, fell under the spell of the Chaldean rites, as reported by Diodorus of Sicily, or those of Ethiopia, described by Diogenes Laertius, or were fascinated by the depth of the ancient traditions of Egypt, reported by Herodotus with great detail. Many peoples have cultivated religious mysteries. The Magi of Persia loved the dark caves for their sacred celebrations; the Hebrews practiced the mysteries of the Kabbalah, probably long before their late medieval development; Caesar, in his Gallic Wars, describes those of the Druids.
Benjamin Constant devotes part of his book on « Religion, considered in its source, its forms and its development », to this transnational, multicultural, and several thousand year old phenomenon. « The mysteries of Eleusis were brought by Eumolpe, from Egypt or Thrace. Those of Samothrace, which served as a model for almost all those of Greece, were founded by an Egyptian Amazon (Diodorus of Sicily 3.55). The daughters of Danaus established the Thesmophoria (Herodotus 2:171; 4:172) and the Dionysians were taught to the Greeks by Phoenicians (Herodotus 2:49) or Lydians (Euripides, The Bacchaeans, 460-490). The mysteries of Adonis penetrated from Assyria through the island of Cyprus into the Peloponnese. The dance of the Athenian women to the Thesmophoria was not a Greek dance (Pollux, Onomast. 4) and the name of the Sabarian rites brings us back to Phrygia.» iii
Benjamin Constant notes that the names Ceres and Proserpine in the language of the Cabirs are identical to those of the Queen of the Underworld and her daughter among the Indians, Ceres deriving from Axieros and Asyoruca, and Proserpine from Axiocersa and Asyotursha. He quotes Creutzer who asserts, in his Mithraics (III,486), that the formulas with which the Greek initiates were consecrated (« Konx, Om, Pax ») are in reality Sanskrit words. Konx (κονξ) comes from Kansha (the object of desire), Om is the famous Vedic monosyllable, and Pax (παξ) comes from Pasha (Fortune).
Other similarities are worth noting, such as the role of the (stylized) representation of the sexual organs in Vedic and Greek cults. Constant indicates that the Pelagi in Samothrace worshipped the phallus, as reported by Herodotusiv, and that in the Thesmophoria a representation of the cteisv was staged. The Dionysian Canephores, young virgins chosen from the best families, carried the sacred phallus on their heads in baskets and brought it close to the lips of the candidates for initiation. »vi It was through the Lernéan mysteries that were celebrated in Argolide in honor of Bacchus, that the practice of planting phallus on the tombs was introduced »vii, symbols of genetic power, but also of the immortality of the soul and metempsychosis. Cicero speaks of the infamy of the Sabarian mysteriesviii, Ovid and Juvenal describe the obscene ceremonies of the feasts of Adonisix. Tertullian condemns: « What the mysteries of Eleusis have of more holy, what is carefully hidden, what one is admitted to know only very late, it is the simulacrum of the Phallus. » x
Eusebius of Caesarea is also interested in these ancient orgies and quotes Clement of Alexandria, a well-informed source, who does not hide his indignation: « Do you want to see the orgies of the Corybantes? You will see only assassinations, tombs, laments of priests, the natural parts of Bacchus with his throat cut, carried in a box and presented for adoration. But don’t be surprised if the barbaric Tuscans have such a shameful cult. What shall I say of the Athenians and the other Greeks, with their mysteries of Demeter? »» xi.
Both sexes are publicly displayed in the sacred cults of the Dioscuri in Samothrace and Bacchus in the Dionysies. It is a « feast of raw flesh, » the interpretation of which can vary considerably. One may decide to see it as a simple allusion to the wine harvest: the torn body of Bacchus is the body of the grape pulled from the vine and crushed under the press. Ceres is the Earth, the Titans are the grape-pickers, Rhea gathers the members of the God torn to pieces, who is incarnated in the wine made from the juice of the grapes.
But the metaphor can be completely overturned, and one can read in it the profound message of a theophany of God’s death and sacrifice, of his dismembered body shared in communion, in a strange prefiguration of Christ’s death, and then of the communion of his flesh and blood by his faithful, even today, at the crucial moment of the Mass.
Always in a kind of pagan prefiguration of Christian beliefs, more than half a millennium ahead of time, we witness the death and resurrection of God: Attys, Adonis, Bacchus and Cadmille die and rise again, following the example of Osiris and Zagreus, avatar of the mystic Dionysus.
We can see that the mystery religions of the Greeks owe almost everything to much older cults, coming from Egypt, Phoenicia, Chaldea, Mesopotamia, and further east still.
This raises a question which is not without merit: to what extent was Christian worship, which appeared some seven or eight centuries later, influenced by those ancient pagan cults revering a God who died in sacrifice for men, and whose body and blood are shared in communion by them? « The Logos as son of God and mediator is clearly designated in all the mysteries. » Benjamin Constant affirms in this regard. xii
The protagonists of the initiation ceremonies, composed of many degrees, certainly did not ask themselves such questions at the time. The initiates to the small mysteries (μύσται, the « mystes ») remained confined to the vestibules of the temples, only the initiates to the great mysteries (ἐπόπται, the « epoptes », a name that later applied to Christian « bishops ») could enter the sanctuary.
But what was their motivation? What was this secret that was so difficult to obtain? What justified to stoically endure eighty degrees of trials (hunger, whip, stay in the mud, in the ice water, and other torments…) to be initiated, for example, to the mysteries of Mithra?
What is certain is that these systems of initiation were subversive, they ruined the bases of the established order, of public religions, making too many gods proliferate, too visible. Part of this last revelation, which it took so long to discover, was the idea of the non-existence of these Homeric gods, popular, multiplied, covering the peristyles of the cities, encouraged by the government of the plebeians. The radical negation of the existence of the national gods, was part of the truths finally revealed to only a very small number of chosen ones.
« The secret did not lie in traditions, fables, allegories, opinions, or the substitution of a purer doctrine: all these things were known. What was secret, then, was not the things that were revealed, but that these things were thus revealed, that they were revealed as the dogmas and practices of an occult religion, that they were revealed gradually. » xiii
The initiation was, well before the time of the modern Enlightenment, a conditioning, a training of the mind, an asceticism of the soul, an exercise in radical doubt, an absolute « mise en abîme ». It was a revelation of the inanity of all revelation. At the end of this long journey, there were no other established doctrines than the absence of any doctrine, only an absolute negation of all known assertions, those which the uneducated people were being fed with. There were no more dogmas, but only signs of recognition, symbols, rallying words that allowed the initiated to allusively share the feeling of their election to penetrate the ultimate ends.
But what were these? If we had to free ourselves from all known gods and dogmas, what was left to believe?
That men go to heaven, and that the Gods have gone to earth.
Cicero testifies to this, in an exchange with an initiate: « In a word, and to avoid a longer detail, was it not men who populated the heaven? If I were to delve into antiquity, and take it upon myself to delve deeper into the stories of the Greeks, we would find that even those of the Gods, who are given the first rank, lived on earth, before going to heaven. Find out which of these Gods, whose tombs are shown in Greece. Since you are initiated into the mysteries, remember the traditions. » xiv
Cicero encourages us to recognize that the greatest of mysteries is that of our soul, and that the most sacred sanctuary is therefore not so inaccessible, since it is so close, though buried in the depths of our intimacy, in the center of our very soul.
« And truly there is nothing so great as to see with the eyes of the soul, the soul itself. This is the meaning of the oracle, which wants everyone to know each other. No doubt Apollo did not pretend to tell us to know our body, our size, our figure. For he who speaks of us does not speak of our body; and when I speak to you, it is not to your body that I speak. When therefore the oracle says to us, ‘Know thyself,’ he hears, ‘Know thy soul. Your body is, so to speak, only the vessel, only the home of your soul. » xv
Cicero, at the peak of his art, is modest. He knows that he owes everything he believes to Plato. This can be summed up in a few incisive phrases, in precise, surgical logic: « The soul feels that she is moving: she feels that she is not dependent on a foreign cause, but that she is by herself, and by her own virtue; it can never happen that she misses herself, so she is immortal.» xvi
If one finds the elliptic reasoning, one can read the more elaborate version, as developed by Plato in the Phaedra, as cited by Cicero in his Tusculanes:
« A being that always moves, will always exist. But he who gives movement to another, and who receives it himself from another, necessarily ceases to exist, when he loses his movement. There is therefore only the being moved by his own virtue, who never loses his movement, because he never misses himself. And moreover he is for all other things that have movement, the source and principle of the movement they have. Now, who says principle, says what has no origin. For it is from the principle that everything comes, and the principle cannot come from anything else. It would not be a principle if it came from elsewhere. And since it has no origin, it will therefore have no end. For, being destroyed, it could neither be itself reproduced by another principle, nor produce another, since a principle presupposes nothing anterior. Thus the principle of movement is in the being moved by its own virtue. A principle that can be neither produced nor destroyed. Otherwise it is necessary that heaven and earth be turned upside down, and that they fall into eternal rest, without ever being able to recover a force, which, as before, makes them move. It is obvious, therefore, that that which is moved by its own virtue, will always exist. And can it be denied that the ability to move in this way is not an attribute of the soul? For everything that is moved only by a foreign cause is inanimate. But that which is animated is moved by its own virtue, by its inner action. Such is the nature of the soul, such is its property. Therefore, the soul being, of all that exists, the only thing that always moves itself, let us conclude from this that it is not born, and that it will never die ». xvii
Are we satisfied enough? Do we need more? We are still far from the Gods, or perhaps much closer than we think. « Immortality, wisdom, intelligence, memory. Since our soul gathers these perfections, it is therefore divine, as I say. Or even a God, as Euripides dared to say. » xviii
The soul is a sun. Cicero reports these last words of Socrates, a few moments before drinking the hemlock: « The whole life of philosophers is a continual meditation of death ». This was his swan song. The swans, by the way, were dedicated to Apollo, because they seem to hold from him the art of knowing the future. Foreseeing the benefits of following death, the swans die voluptuously, while singing. Likewise Socrates, who took the time to recall this metaphor in front of his assembled disciples, sang an unforgettable song, and pondered his ultimate doubt, in the face of imminent death, with the smile of a wise man: « When one looks too fixedly at the setting sun. One comes to see no more. And in the same way, when our soul looks at herself, her intelligence sometimes becomes blurred, so that our thoughts become blurred. We no longer know what to fix ourselves on, we fall from one doubt to another, and our reasoning has as little consistency as a ship beaten by the waves. »
This very doubt, this blindness, this ultimate blurring, when we approach revelation, comes only from the too great strength of this inner sun, which the weak eyes of the mind cannot bear.
To detach the mind from the body is to learn how to die. Let us separate ourselves from our bodies by the power of the soul, and thus become accustomed to dying. By this means, our life will already hold a heavenly life, and we will be better prepared to take off when our chains break.
_______________
i« According to the written documents, Pherecyde of Syros was the first to have said that the souls of men are eternal. « Cicero, Tusculanes, I, 16, 38.
iiPherecyde of Syros, fragment B 22, trans. G. Colli, La sagesse grecque, t. 2, p. 103: scholies of Apollonius of Rhodes, I, 643-648.
iiiBenjamin Constant. Of religion considered in its source, its forms and its developments. 1831. Book 13, ch.12
ivHerodotus, Story 2:51: « The Greeks, then, hold these and many other rites among the Egyptians, of which I will speak later; but it is not according to these peoples that they give the statues of Mercury an indecent attitude. The Athenians were the first to take this custom from the Pelasians; the rest of Greece followed their example. The Pelasges remained in fact in the same canton as the Athenians, who, from that time, were among the Hellenes; and it is for this reason that they then began to be reputed as Hellenes themselves. Whoever is initiated into the mysteries of the Cabires, which the Samothracians celebrate, understands what I am saying; for these Pelasges who came to dwell with the Athenians used to inhabit Samothrace, and it is from them that the peoples of this island took their mysteries. The Athenians are thus the first of the Hellenes who learned from the Pelagiuses to make statues of Mercury in the state we have just represented. The Pelasges give a sacred reason for this, which is explained in the mysteries of Samothrace. « Pierre-Henri Larcher. Paris, Lefevre and Charpentier 1842.
vSee Theodoret, Serm. 7 and 12. The cteis is a Greek word which literally means « tooth comb » but which also figuratively designates the pubis of the woman, and also means « cup, chalice ».
viTheodoret, Therapeut. Disput. 1, cited by B. Constant in op.cit. Book 13, ch.2
Orpheus descended to the Underworld and was initiated into the Mysteries of Isis and Osiris (those Gods called Demeter and Dionysus among the Greeks, Ceres and Bacchus, among the Romans). He established in Greece the cult of Hecate in Aegina, and that of Isis-Demeter in Sparta. His disciples, the Orphics, were at once marginal, individualistic, mystical, and loving life.
In contrast, the Pythagoreans, though also influenced by orphism, were « communist and austere », to use H. Lizeray’s formula. Socrates had said: « Everything is common, – between friends. »
If Pythagoras had a tendency towards « communism », and Orpheus towards « individualism”, what does it teach us, today, in terms of the fundamental aspirations of mankind?
A Jewish historian, Artapanus, living in
Alexandria under the Ptolemy, more than 2300 years ago, affirmed
that Moses and Hermes Trismegistus were one and the same person. This
provocative thesis is obviously controversial. But from the point of
view of cultures quietly assuming their « symbiosis » (such
as the one prevailing in the vibrant Alexandria of this time), this
idea has the merit of being a pungent symptom.
Whether or not he was
in fact Moses, the man named Hermes Trismegistus was a remarkable
character. Almost two thousand years before Blaise Pascal, Hermes
struck a famous formula, quoted in the Asclepius: « God, –
a spiritual circle whose center is everywhere, and the circumference
nowhere. »
His Poimandrès
is also moving by his scope of vision, and the prophetic power of his
intuitions. Here are the first lines.
« I was
thinking about beings one day; my thoughts hovered in the heights,
and all my body sensations were numb as in the heavy sleep that
follows satiety, excess or fatigue. It seemed to me that an immense
being, without defined limits, called me by name and said to me: What
do you want to hear and see, what do you want to learn and know?
– Who are you, I
answered?
– I am, he said,
Poimandrès, the sovereign intelligence. I know what you want, and
everywhere I am with you.
– I want, I replied, to
be educated about beings, to understand their nature and to know God.
– Receive in your mind
everything you want to know, » he said to me, « I will
instruct you.
At these words, he
changed his appearance, and immediately everything was discovered to
me in a moment, and I saw an indefinable spectacle. »
There is something
divine in Hermes, just like in Moses. Why hide it? Today, there are
few men of this calibre. Does this make the world more difficult to
live in? Less open to wisdom? This can be believed if we stick to
Plato’s description of the philosopher.
« This is why the
philosopher’s thought is the only winged one; for those higher
realities to which he is constantly applied by memory to the extent
of his forces, it is to these very realities that God owes his
divinity. However, it is by straightforwardly using such means of
remembrance that a man who is always perfectly initiated to perfect
initiations, becomes, alone, really perfect. But as he departs from
what is the object of human concern and applies to what is divine,
the crowd shows him that he is disturbed in spirit; but he is
possessed of a God, and the crowd does not suspect it! »i
Today, as in the past,
the opinion of the crowd often prevails over that of the wise man.
But the latter does not care. He is « possessed ».
There is nothing
better, in order to understand an era, than to look at the forms of
“possession”, of « disturbance », the ways of « delirium »,
which it condemns or recognizes.
In Poimandrès
Hermes gives crucial indications in this regard on the concerns of
his time. He describes his own transport in an immortal body, and the
ecstasy of his soul.
In the Symposium,
Plato recounts the dive of purified souls into the ocean of divine
beauty. In the Epinomis,
he explains how the soul can be united with God, then living through
Him, rather than by herself.
It is difficult not to
be struck by the incredible distance between the experience of these
ancient thinkers and that of most intellectuals and other publicists
at the beginning of the 21st century.
Few, it seems, can
still get the faintest idea of what the experience of ecstasy was
really like for Moses, for Hermes, or for Socrates.
« Modern
thinkers »
have almost completely severed the links with these multi-millennial
experiments. We see in the media professionals of the sacredness,
spokesmen for
faith X, religion Y or spirituality Z, parading on stages, pulpits,
platforms, or screens, proclaiming themselves guardians of divine
laws, imposing sermons and homilies, launching anathema or fatwas.
The modern domain
of the « sacred » forms a noisy, blurred, confused scene.This
confusion hides a more substantial opacity. The untouched,
unsuspected mystery still lies in the depths, much deeper than the
spiritual night that surrounds us on all sides. Marsilio
Ficino, one of
the Renaissance thinkers who best resisted modern desiccation, then
in genesis,
described an interesting phenomenon, the path of the mind captured by
the object of his research:
« By ardently
loving this light, even if it is obscurely perceived, these
intelligences are completely engulfed in its heat, and once they are
engulfed, which is the hallmark of love, they are transformed into
light. Strengthened by this light, they very easily become by love
the very light they previously tried to follow with their eyes.»ii
Ficino, who seems to
have experienced the thing for himself, believes that there are nine
possible degrees of contemplation of God. Three are related to his
goodness, three are related to his wisdom, and three are related to
his power. But these approaches are not equivalent.
“We fear the power of
God, we seek his wisdom, we love his goodness. Only the love of his
goodness transforms the soul into God.”iii
Why all these ways,
then, if there is only one effective? The symbolism of the number 9
is to be taken into account. Virgil used it, too. « The Styx,
interposing itself nine times, locks them in. »iv
Ficino
quotes Hesiod, Virgil, Ovid, Hermes Trismegistus, Plato. In
the middle of the Renaissance, he
dreams of the
golden age, during which the mysteries had
been
contemplated.
The intelligence of men
is bound and weak. To dream today of a new golden age is to believe
once again in a possible leap, a huge leap, from this weakness,
towards the vision of the high mysteries, or even their
understanding.
The testimony of
the great elders on this subject is invaluable. They say the
leap is
possible. They suggest that this experience is always open to anyone
who undertakes this journey with determination. We must rely on the
general strengths of universal symbiosis to help us through the
difficult stages that await the Argonauts of life. Orpheus warns: « It
is impossible to force the gates of the kingdom of Pluto; inside
lives the people
of dreams.»v
But these doors can be
opened, as if by magic. How? Orpheus entrusts his method: « Daughters
of Mnemosyne and Jupiter, O famous and illustrious Muses, goddesses
who will generate all the arts, nourish the spirit, inspire right
thoughts, wisely rule the souls of men and have taught them divine
sacrifices; Clio, Euterpe, Thalie, Melpomene, Terpsichore, Erato,
Polymnia, Urania and Calliope, come with your august mother; come to
us and be favourable to us, bring us the Almighty Glory and Wisdom.»vi
For those who would
have a sensitivity to immanence, Orpheus proposes to invoke the
« universal substance »:
« I invoke Pan, the
universal substance of the world, of the sky, of the deep sea, of the
earth of various forms and of the imperishable flame. These are just
scattered members of Pan. Pan at the feet of goats, wandering god,
master of storms, who drives the stars and whose voice represents the
eternal concerts of the world, god loved by herdsmen and pastors who
love the clear fountains, fast god who inhabits the hills, friend of
sound, dear god of nymphs, god who generates all things, procreative
power of the universe.»vii
For those who prefer to
put themselves under the shadow of the Law, Orpheus also has a sign:
« I invoke the
divine Law, the genius of men and immortals; the heavenly goddess,
governing the stars, the common sign of all things, the foundation of
nature, the sea and the earth. A constant Goddess, keeping the
eternal laws of heaven and faithfully carrying out her immense
revolutions; you who grant mortals the benefits of a prudent life and
govern all that breathes; you whose wise counsel directs all things
according to equity, goddess always favourable to the just, but
overwhelming the wicked with severe punishments, sweet goddess who
distributes goods with delicious largess, remember us and speak our
name with friendship.»viii
The journey has
only just begun. It has no end. Any vessel
will do, to the
one who knows the bearings, even
fuzzily. Only imagination and hope are
likely to be in short supply.
And courage.
We humans are
fundamentally nomads, – with no nomosi.
We are forever nomads with no limits, and no ends.
Always
dissatisfied, never
at peace, never at rest, perpetually
on the move, forever in exile.
The
Journey has no end. Wandering is meaningless, without clues.
The homelands are suffocating. Landscapes are passing by, and we have
no roots. No
abyss fulfills
us. The deepest oceans
are empty. The skies, down there, are fading. The suns are pale, the
moons dirty. The stars are blinking. We can
only breathe for
a moment.
Our
minds would
like to look beyond the diffuse background,
behind the veiled Cosmos.
But even an infinitely powerful Hubble
telescope couldn’t
show us anything
of what’s
behind. Cosmology is a prison, only
vaster,
but still finite,
bounded, and we
are already tired of endless, useless,
multiverses, and
weary of their aborted
drafts.
The
worried soul « pursues an Italy that is slipping away », but
Virgil is not anymore
our vigilante, and
Aeneas is not our elder. Rome has forgotten itself. Athens has died
out. Jerusalem, we already have
returned there, –
so they say.
Billions
of people live,
dream and
die on the
Promised Land.
They
try, every night, to drink
the water of the Lethe
and the Cocyte,
without being burnt by the Phlegethon.
When they wake up, they are
always thirsty
for new caresses,
they want again to
smell myrrh, to taste nectars.
They try to avoid
the icy skin of mirrors. They desperately scan the hairy mountains,
the undecided rivers, the bitter oranges. They follow the hard curve
of the fruits, the orb of the colors.
But at one point the
heart hits, the body falls. At any moment, the final night will cover
the sun. Forgetting all will come without fail.
Euripides called
life: « the dream of a shadow ».ii
This shadow has two
wings, – not six, like Ezekiel’s angels.
Intelligence
and will are our
wings, says Plato.
With
one wing, the
shadow (or the soul) sucks
in, breathes in. The world comes into her.
With
the other wing,
she goes to all things, she flies freely, anywhere.
When
the two wings flap together, then anything
is possible. The
soul can evade anywhere, even out of herself, and even from God
Himself. As Marsilio Ficino says: « Animus noster poterit deus
quidam evadere ».
There
is a mysterious
principle at the heart of
the soul: she
becomes what she’s looking for. She is
transformed into what she loves.
Who
said that? A litany of impressive thinkers.
Zoroaster, King David. Plato,
Porphyry, Augustine.
Paul put it that way:
« And
we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory, are
being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory. »iii
It
is indeed a mysterious principle.
The
word ‘mystery’ comes from the Greek μύω, to close. This verb
was originally
used for the eyes, or for the lips. Closed
eyes. Closed lips. The religious meaning,
as a derivative,
describes an ancient problem: how could
what is always closed
be ever opened?
Zoroaster
found an answer, kind of:
« The human soul
encloses God in herself,
so to speak, when, keeping nothing mortal, she
gets drunk entirely on the divinity”.iv
Who still reads or
pays attention to Zoroaster today?
Nietzsche?
But Nietzsche, the gay
barbarian, joyfully ripped
away his nose, teeth and tongue.
After that, he pretended
he could speak
on his behalf.
Also Sprach Zarathustra. Ach
so? Wirklich?
There
are two kinds of thinkers.
There are the
atrabilaries, who distill their venom, their suspicions, their
despair, or their limitations, like Aristotle, Chrysippus, Zeno,
Averroes, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche.
And
there are the optimists, Heraclitus,
Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, or Apollonius
of Thyana. They believe in life and in
everything that may
flourish.
We’ll
rely on Heraclitus for
a concluding line: “If
you do not expect the unexpected you will not find it, for it is not
to be reached by search or trail”.
(Fragm. 18)
What can we learn from that fragment?
Without hope, everything is and will stay forever
mud, mire, or muck. We have to
search for the unexpected, the impossible, the inaccessible… What
on earth could it be? – Gold in the mud,
– or in the
mire, drowning
angels?
The prophet Daniel speaks as a seer: “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever. » (Dan. 12,2-3)
This saying refers to the « wise » and to the “righteous”. It is not just a question of knowledge, but of justice, of a wisdom that is less human than divine. How to reach it? How to access these high places?
Many are those who doubt their own divinity, those who have never turned their eyes to the splendour of intelligence, of wisdom. There are even more who prefer the mist of the senses, the thickness of the bodies, to the thin acuity of the soul.
How
would they achieve the wisdom
and justice that Daniel is talking about?
Plato,
who was not a prophet, but no less a seer, advises us to meditate
unceasingly on death.
“Either
in no way can we ever acquire
knowledge, or it is for us only once
we have passed away.”i
The way
to be as close to divine knowledge as possible is to have as little
trade as possible with the body. Going to the limit, we deduce that
death only is the kingdom of true knowledge. This is the « immense
hope » that Socrates joyfully shares with his afflicted friends,
shortly before drinking the hemlock.
What
is this hope based on? It is based on
an idea as anti-modern
as possible: « We
are divine beings ». How can such a statement be made? “Because,
momentarily deprived of our heavenly abode and homeland, that is, as
long as we are on earth God’s substitutes, we are constantly
tormented by the desire of this heavenly homeland and no earthly
pleasure can console in the present exile the human intelligence
desiring a better condition.”ii
This
immense hope, without reason, is based – it is a paradox – on the
sole activity of reason.
Marsilio
Ficino gives this explanation:
“The
hope of immortality results from a surge of reason, since the soul
hopes not only without the help of the senses, but despite their
opposition. That is why I find nothing more admirable than this hope,
because, while we live incessantly among ephemeral beings, we do not
cease to hope.”iii
These unreasonable ideas have been shared by thinkers as diverse as Zoroaster, Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, Aglaopheme, Pythagoras, Plato… They have created schools of thought, their disciples have proliferated: Xenocrat, Arcesilas, Carneade, Ammonius, Plotinus, Proclus…
On a
philosophical level, Socrates’ argument seems to have a certain
scope. Reason says that there are only two hypotheses: either
knowledge is not possible at all, or it is only possible after death.
If we
decide to ignore the Socratic, resolutely optimistic point of view,
absolute horror would therefore resemble this: to see clearly with
the eyes of pure reason the absurdity and inanity of a human
condition, capable of reason, and capable of drawing from it the most
crazy, most absurd hypotheses.
Metaxu. Le blog de Philippe Quéau 
Vous devez être connecté pour poster un commentaire.